Character Creation , Start Here

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In Pathfinder 2e all things follow the ABCs,
Ancestry, Backgrounds, Class

These things help determine your ability boosts, feats, and profiencies during character creation.

On the left hand side of Archive of Nethys you can browse through the various ancestries, backgrounds and classes the game has to offer.

You may select any option you feel you can handle. If it is tagged with "RARE" or "UNCOMMON", check in with your dungeon master first.

Characters start at level 3. You start with two permanent 1st level items and one permanent 2nd level item and 25 gp.

Ancestry

This is akin to Race in D&D and Pathfinder 1. It is a piecemeal selection.

• Ancestry: This is the major portion of your selection, it often gives you features like innate ability boosts, vision and sense modifiers and base movement speed.
• Heritage: This is a modifier to your ancestry selection. It will give you features like innate weapons, magic and abilities that are inherant to you.
• Ancestry Feats: Every character is given access to ancestry feats at 1, 5, 9, and 13, 17 (every four levels), if you do get access to a prominent ancestral feature now, you can get as a feat.
  

Backgrounds

This is an aspect of your character's history before adventuring. You acquire two ability boosts, you become trained in one skill and you get trained in a lore skill (a very specialized skill). You will also usually recieve a skill feat.

• Depending on your organization's background for this campaign, you will recieve an extra background.

Class

The most definitive part of your character's adventuring career. There is a chart listed in the links and resources threads to aide in the decision making. Most classes have a subclass to select and your feature selections are often determined by your class feat selections.

• Multiclassing: a large pool of feats called Archetypes are available to all characters who qualify, these allow characters to expand their powers beyond the scope of their class- often overlapping into other classes. Instead of choosing a class feat at a particular level one can use an archetype feat instead. Typically one is supposed to "finish" an archetype before moving to a different one, usually by picking three feats from that tag.